I learnt a new word today! “Ultracrepidarian.” It comes from the quotation above, which in turn comes from the Latin writer Pliny’s extraordinary encyclopaedia on every subject under the sun, called Naturalis Historia, On Natural History. Book 35 is about painters and painting, and Chapter 36 lists several of the most prominent of the age. One was Zeuxis, whose concern for realistic beauty is epitomised by his requirement for all the young maidens of town of the Agrigentum to be paraded naked in front of him, whereupon he selected five to act as models, so that he could choose the most beautiful parts of each for his painting of Helena. The same Zeuxis also painted a boy with a bowl of grapes which were so realistic that birds came to peck at them. The self-critical artist simply said that the grapes must have been more realistic than the boy, or the birds would have been too frightened of him to swoop down on the grapes.
Then there was Parrhasius, Timanthes, Euxinidas, Aristides, Eupompus, Pamphilus and so on and so on, but of all of them, Apelles of Cos, in the hundred and twelfth Olympiad, surpassed all the other painters who either preceded or succeeded him, and single-handed, contributed more to painting than all the others together. Having executed a perfect painting, he used to hide nearby and listen to the comments of the passers-by, and one day, a passing shoemaker started pontificating, saying that Apelles had missed a shoe-lace out of a shoe. Apelles was mortified; but the next day the same shoemaker came past and also criticised the position of a leg, at which Apelles jumped out and told him to stick to his own area of expertise and not meddle in things he knew nothing about. “Ne sutor ultra crepidam iudicaret,” “Let the shoemaker not criticise further than his shoe,” or, as we say nowadays: “Cobbler, stick to your last.”
So what’s all this about? Well, over the past few months a broadcaster called Saint John Paul II Catholic Radio has been running a periodic podcast on its JP2 Morning Crew platform called “Unveiling the Mystery: The Shroud of Turin,” featuring, as its guide and mentor, Dr John Sottosanti, a highly qualified, published and experienced… dental surgeon.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I myself am much less qualified, much less published, and not a surgeon of any kind, but I do check my facts…
“I read recently that they actually found a limestone slab in [Jesus’s] tomb, probably, I’m guessing, maybe sixteen feet or so long,” says Dr Sottosanti, which would be an ideal length for laying out the Shroud and folding it over a body. Only…
I think five feet long would have been a more accurate guess.
Never mind, most of Part One is reasonably accurate, but every now and then we are brought up short, rather as if we were reading a convincing Chatbot, only to be jolted out of our complacency by a sudden egregious howler which makes us wonder how on earth it could have got it so wrong.
“The image appeared somewhere around the middle of the 14th century in Lirey, France. It was owned by one of the Knights Templar, and people think he had gotten it when the Knights Templar had sacked Constantinople.”
Eh? The Knights Templar were not present at the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, and the Order had been utterly annihilated by 1320, more than thirty years before the Shroud’s first appearance.
“NASA had a plan to not only land somebody on the moon, but to explore the planets. But if you’re going to land something on the moon or a distant planet, how would you know, when you took a two-dimensional photograph, what are mountains and what are valleys? So they developed something called a VP-8 Imager in which you could take a photo of a planet or the moon and put it in there and it would give you a 3D photograph of that object.”
Eh? Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking about on the moon in 1969, three years before the VP-8 Image Analyser was invented. And it wasn’t invented by NASA, and it wasn’t used to make 3D ‘photographs’ of mountains and valleys, or any other extra-terrestrial terrain.
“Any photo that you put in of a person or anything else that you put in the VP-8 Imager, it does not give a three dimensional picture of their face.”
To be fair to the doctor, this is a common misconception, derived from the deliberately obfuscatory demonstrations of the early STuRP members. In fact, quite good 3D visualisations can be made of a great many face-on portraits, such as this, of John Sottosanti himself, grabbed from the very video where he says it’s impossible.
The nonsense about the VP-8 Analyser is repeated in Part 2 of this series of presentations, followed by the information that when the STuRP team took sticky-tape samples from the nose, the knee and the foot, they found travertine aragonite on all three. Well, no, of course they didn’t. They didn’t even take a sticky-tape sample from the nose, and they didn’t find ‘dirt’ on their knee sample. Then we get the information that the crown of thorns was made of Ziziphus spina-christi, although Max Frei only identified pollen from Gundelia tournefortii, that the STuRP team spent 52 hours studying the Shroud hands-on, and that Max Frei invented sticky-tape. These last two are just ‘oral typos,’ of course, and Sottosanti was under pressure to get finished in time, but our confidence is flagging.
“Most likely, the nail did go into the palm but it went in at an angle so that it came out through the wrist, and to do that, it went right through the wrist bones, and there is a space, called ‘Destot’s Space’ in among the wrist bones, and there is also the median nerve, and the nail goes through which causes excruciating pain, and then hitting that nerve would collapse the thumb.”
Eh? It was Dr Zugibe who proposed that the nail went in at an angle, and Dr Barbet who claimed that it went through Destot’s Space and hit the median nerve – but they can’t both be right. Zugibe flatly denied that the nail went through `Destot’s Space,’ and also said that even if it hit the median nerve, it wouldn’t cause the thumb to collapse. Dr Sottosanti makes the typical, but unprofessional, authenticist mistake of conflating two contradictory opinions and presenting them both as simultaneous facts.
Part 3 was about the radiocarbon dating, and was the same litany of errors. A famous photo by Barrie Schwortz, captioned on shroud.com as Ray Rogers, John Jackson and Giovanni Riggi peering under the cloth, is misidentified as Max Frei, the herringbone weave is described as ‘4 to 1’ not ‘3 to 1,’ and the usual collection of mutually conflicting conspiracy theories is trotted out as if they might all be true. With ponderous inevitability, the infamous quad mosaic is presented with the quite untrue statement that “the green [colour of the radiocarbon corner] doesn’t show up hardly anywhere in the Shroud; just a little bit here and there,” and the podcast concludes with an illustration of something purporting to be “[Ray] Rogers’ work,” in which the top two illustrations are contradictory of the bottom two (“splicing” versus “interweaving”), and none are actual photographs of the Shroud.
Finally, in Part 4, our dental surgeon was able to bring his own expertise to the table, and I have discussed his case for teeth less acerbically in my previous post. I don’t think the case is made, but at least it isn’t absurd. However, I took him to task for a later comment, in which he understood Paolo di Lazzaro’s experiments with UV radiation to mean that to recreate the image:
“You would need 34 [TeraWatts] of energy. Now, to put that in perspective, all the energy in the United States in one moment in time is something like 1.1 [TeraWatt], so you would need 30 times that to put this image on the cloth. […] Now the other thing is if you hit the cloth with too much energy you’d burn right through it. […] So Paolo di Lazzaro, in Italy, figured out that, yes, you need all this light energy, but you’d have to deliver it in under a billionth of a second.”
This is very confused, scientifically, and was not enhanced at the time by miscalling TeraWatts as TeraBytes. When I queried Dr Sottosanti, he said he’d got his data from Giulio Fanti’s book Il Mystero Della Sindone, but those numbers are not in my copy at all. Fanti simply refers to a paper in Italian by Giuseppe Baldacchini, Paolo di Lazzaro et al.1 which is represented in English by ‘Colouring Fabrics with Excimer Lasers to Simulate Encoded Images: the Case of the Shroud of Turin,’ 2009, with di Lazzaro as the first author. Nowhere do Sottosanti’s figures appear, so I wonder where he got them from. Rashly assuming (before checking! Terrible mistake.) that he had indeed got them from Fanti, and that he had copied them correctly, I blamed Fanti for misrepresenting di Lazzaro’s work. This was quite wrong, and I am extremely sorry to have so maligned him.
So what’s the buzz? The energy delivered by 34 TW of power in one billionth of a second is 34kJ. For those unfamiliar with physics, this is about the energy needed to boil a cup of water. Sottosanti got quite excited about this, and said he’d rather believe a university professor than someone with no peer-reviewed papers to his name. In the absence of any other information, such an appeal to authority is perfectly justified, but the other information is there, and it’s easy to check.
According to di Lazzaro, “the total UV radiation power required to colour a linen surface, corresponding to a human body, of the order of 16×106 W/cm2 x 17,000cm2 = 2.7×1011 W, is impressive, and cannot be delivered by any UV laser built to date.” And he’s quite correct, assuming the pulses of laser energy were simultaneous all over the body. However, this statement does not say anything about the amount of energy delivered. That depends on the time this power was “switched on,” and di Lazzaro tells us that it was delivered in a series of very short pulses. The most successful was an ArF laser, with a wavelength of 193nm, emitting 0.1J in each 12ns pulse (that’s 12 billionths of a second per pulse), although the paper does not say how many pulses were required. A clearer account of the exact parameters of the experiments is given in Table 1 of another paper, di Lazzaro’s ‘Deep Ultraviolet Radiation Simulates the Turin Shroud Image’ (Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 2010). Here it is:
From this we see that the Shroud’s colouration is best achieved by firing about 300 shots at each square centimetre of the cloth, at about 2500MW/cm2, delivering about 30J/cm2. If this is extended to cover the whole area of the body, which di Lazzaro calculates (in the earlier paper quoted above) at 17000cm2, then the total power is 42.5 TW and the total energy 510kJ. The power is indeed, “impressive,” but the total energy delivered is, as I have often claimed, scarcely enough to boil a kettle. Each shot is about 12ns long, and at a rate of 10Hz, it would take 30s for the image to arrive on the cloth.
But why should it all happen at once? Maybe the resurrection energy started at the heart, and spread outwards across the body. A continuous series of 250GW bursts of energy covering 100cm2, radiating outwards to cover 100cm2 every 30s, would take about an hour and a half to revivify the whole body.2
Of course Sottosanti, scientist or not, doesn’t understand any of this, because he hasn’t actually read the primary sources at all. He is an ultracrepidarian, and should stick to his last.
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1). Giuseppe Baldacchini et al., ‘Colorazione di Tessuti di Lino con Laser Eccimero e Confronto con l’Immagine Sindonica,’ Relazione Tecnica ENEA, 2006
2). Extrapolated from an idea by Otangelo Grasso.
“ULTRACREPIDARIANS” OF THE WORLD, UNITE!!!
Hi, Hugh,
Some further comments regarding the “ultracrepidarians” of the world is needed. Let’s first get into definitions of an ultracrepidarian. I’m going to go with the one that concerns someone giving opinions on something beyond their area of expertise (although the definition can, also, extend to someone giving opinions about something beyond their knowledge.) There is a common phrase that one hears among, in particular, scientists who comment on the Holy Shroud–they’ll suggest (to non-scientists) to “stay in their own lane”–as in, don’t comment on scientific matters if you’re not a scientist. Well, I think that, ultimately, that’s hubris, because it presupposes that people without scientific bona fides are incapable of becoming self-educated on matters of particular interest to themselves.
If one is not going to go all-out and become self-educated in an area (where it would be the functional equivalent of getting a degree (bachelor’s, master’s or doctorate) in an area that one wants to discuss, one can still very competently learn about a particular matter if one applies a laser-like focus to studying the issue. I’ve found that to be done at a high level, most topics will, at minimum, take a week, but often it can be weeks or several months–sometimes even longer than that, but it can be done by us ultracrepidarians.
But, as we say, here’s the rub: scientists (like everyone else) often repeat information which they did not personally spend days or weeks or months validating. They very, very, very often repeat information without having replicated an experiment that they are commenting on or relying on as part of what they mention in papers and books that they write. Education and knowledge encourage us to, often, just try and build upon the work of others, but, sometimes, the information will be wrong. This is a problem that transcends Sindonology.
Many people who try to share knowledge about the Holy Shroud are doing so for one of the most important things that one can do in life–spread information about the Gospel as it is contained in the 4 Gospels of the New Testament, and spread knowledge about the Gospel of the Holy Shroud–and what that really means–which is, that one can have real knowledge that Jesus’ blood remains with us on this cloth which bears His body images from, what I call, “Resurrection energy.”
Now, you and I, Hugh, are sticklers for detail, and we wield it as both a sword and a shield. And, that is, I think, ideal. But, there is this very nagging issue: Is it morally right to withhold some of the most important information–in a global way (concerning God’s existence and the powerful evidence of this from the scientific, medical and forensic information derived from information gotten from the Holy Shroud) from people unless one so ridiculously edits one’s speech so as to only repeat those things which one has exhaustively, personally researched? Well, clearly, the answer to this is NO. This is not how most human beings operate–even people writing about a topic in their own area of expertise. This is not just a problem in Shroud studies. I have, repeatedly, witnessed scientists, theologians, New Testament scholars, professional translators repeat information in their scholarly works/commentaries that is–upon much closer examination through a much broader examination–dead wrong. A perfect example of this is with what I found out about how long rigor mortis can last. Gee whiz, I studied that issue for well over two months, and I found incorrect information being repeated over and over and over again in peer-reviewed medical journals! That’s because information that is thought to be correct keeps getting repeated by the non-ultracrepidarians–but, that doesn’t mean that it’s, in fact, correct. https://urfjournals.org/open-access/beyond-imagination-evidence-of-rigor-mortis-and-cadaveric-spasm-on-the-shroud-of-turin.pdf Information spread by many scholars who have studied the Holy Shroud for many years has gotten some of the details incorrect about the VP-8 and who invented it and what it was, in fact, used for. For details on the VP-8 that I exhaustively researched, please examine the footnotes in my aforementioned paper. Additionally, for some of the most vital pieces of information concerning Holy Shroud, I invite people to examine (as you have already done with your prior review of my paper) my curated highlights in the introduction of that same paper which I provide sources for everything that I mention. I add that I behaved as a non-ultracrepidarian as I used my legal training to do my best to carefully research and carefully phrase every jot and tittle in those highlights and the commentary in those footnotes. Those were written with the full knowledge that they were going to be scrutinized for accuracy through the “splitting of hairs.”
But, again, let’s bring things back to the overarching question: is it necessary that before someone can share vital news that is–in its overall sense–quite accurate if one is at risk, when speaking, of repeating mistaken information that other experts have stated? Again, as I mentioned, we have this problem that I have personally verified in the scientific realm–this is not a Shroud problem–it is just the real problem of the practical necessity of someone’s not always being forced to reinvent the wheel or replicate every single scientific experiment that hinges upon a scientific claim that one wants to make. This demand for accuracy with every jot and tittle ends up–lest one get publicly excoriated–becomes a horrible chilling effect on the spreading of critical news which is, nonetheless, quite accurate. And, when the information that is being spread is something that revolves around where we will spend eternity, then getting every jot and tittle 100% right is less important than getting the overall message correct.
Also, it is a tremendous disservice to people when you do what you have done with this commentary that you have done regarding Dr. John Sottosanti. It is the use of smoke-and-mirrors to create the illusion that he is not credible if he speaks of something beyond his precise area of expertise as a dental surgeon. But, his message to people is TRUE–regardless of his having repeated (often-repeated) incorrect information about the VP-8 in connection with Mars–and others have said the moon. I give the details, again, in the footnotes of my paper with a citation to where a government document specifies what the VP-8 was used for. The focus should be on whether the overall message is True or not–as opposed to finding some sort of flaw with some of the more off-handed remarks which are not overly important in the overall scheme of things.
Additionally, I will add that this nit-picking seems to be a response to the powerful information that he has presented–in his non-ultracrepidarian capacity–regarding the teeth that he and I and others have noticed on the image of the Holy Face on the Holy Shroud. But, Dr. Sottosanti brings his expertise to notice even finer details that would have been beyond the imagination of any forger to have added.
The vigor of your attack against Dr. Sottosanti is, I think, indicative of the strength that you actually see in his very specific observations of the teeth really have on the authenticity of the Shroud and the supernatural nature of the manner in which Its body images were created.
Best regards,
Teddi
Hi John,
That’s such a good-spirited reply that I’m loathe to criticise it. Wrong, but good-natured. Just, please, keep an eye out for the more egregious howlers in further JP2 broadcasts.
My own post, “Calling All Presenters,” may be a help.
Best wishes,
Hugh
Dear Hugh.
I am the ultracrepidarian about whom you wrote. You are an excellent speaker and writer, but at times your fact checking is inaccurate and misleading. Was the 3D image you made of my screenshot face produced by a VP-8 Analyzer, or was it done with modern software? I claimed, based upon testimony from STuRP team members, that the VP-8 analyzer (made for Mars, and other planets, so you are right on that issue) could not take a photograph of a person and give a 3D image. Please let me know if you presently have access to the 1970’s VP-8 device, and that is what you used for my screenshot photo, or whether it was modern software.
I decided to in turn fact check you so I listened to your YouTube debate with Teddi Pappas from three years ago titled “Shroud Wars—Debate between Teddi Pappas & Hugh Farey”. You used a bit of history from the late 14th century to give strong support for your position that the Shroud is a fake. At the 28:34 mark in the talk you state, “Not only did the Bishop of Troyes think that that the Shroud was a fake, but so did the Pope think the Shroud was a fake, and, in fact, Geoffroi II de Charny said the Shroud was a fake. Every body said the Shroud was a fake.”
There is no historical evidence that Geoffroi de Charny II believed the Shroud of Turin was a forgery. The de Charny family, including Geoffroi de Charny II, actively promoted and exhibited the Shroud as a relic in Lirey during the late 14th century, despite ecclesiastical investigations and denunciations labeling it as an artificial creation. Even after Bishop Perre d’Arcis, who resented the amount of money being spent at the small church in Lirey,,, instead of at his Troyes Cathedral, sent his famous Memorandum to Pope Clement VII, asserting it was a painted forgery. The pope allowed it to be displayed as merely a “figure of representation,” and not an authentic relic. Despite this, the de Charny family continued to treat the cloth as a valuable relic. Geoffroi II safeguarded it during the Hundred Years’ War, and his granddaughter Marguerite de Charny later sold it to the House of Savoy for a considerable sum in 1453, representing it as a genuine relic.
Let’s agree to stop the fact checking and simply appreciate the good the other has done for humanity. I like that you keep the “authenticists” alert because they know you are watching them. Good job!
Best regards,
John Sottosanti
Hi Hugh,
So you learned a new word today. Most, perhaps all of your readers must have also learned a new word whilst reading your post…
Best wishes
Patrick
Hi Otangelo,
Your conviction does you credit, and if you have found sufficient evidence to reach the intellectually satisfying conclusion that the Shroud is authentic, then far be it from me to dissuade you. What is particularly generous about your comment is the admission that there remains enough ambiguity for those who do not wish it to be authentic to maintain that position if they choose. I have had a quick Look at Claims 1 and 2 of your list, and cannot find that your references, or any other references for that matter, support either of them, so forgive me if a) I don’t plough on through the other 65, and b) I don’t find them “features that clearly stand in need of explanation.”
Best wishes,
Hugh
Dear Hugh,
I agree with you that some sindonologists do extrapolate and try to extract “hidden gems” from the data – supposed clues to authenticity that simply are not warranted. Set that aside, however, and we are still left with a core body of undisputed, non-speculative evidence which, taken together, points strongly toward the authenticity of the Shroud.
In one of my papers : Evidence Supporting the Shroud of Turin’s Authenticity: A Comprehensive Scientific Analysis https://www.academia.edu/142994424/Evidence_Supporting_the_Shroud_of_Turins_Authenticity_A_Comprehensive_Scientific_Analysis
I enumerate 59 specific lines of evidence. Your hypothesis does not offer a coherent or plausible account for the great majority of these features that clearly stand in need of explanation. At this stage, it looks as though the medieval-origin thesis is being kept on life support largely by personal preference rather than by a comprehensive evidential framework.
I am convinced that God, in his wisdom, has allowed enough light for those who genuinely seek the truth: they will find sufficient evidence to reach the intellectually satisfying conclusion that the Shroud is authentic – a remarkable empirical witness to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. At the same time, there remains enough ambiguity for those who do not wish it to be authentic to maintain that position if they choose.